OTTAWA – Among the controversial proposals in the Conservative government’s proposed Fair Elections Act is one to eliminate Elections Canada’s abilities to run campaigns encouraging Canadians to get out and vote – no matter who for.

According to Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s minister of state for democratic reform, Elections Canada’s outreach campaigns – which began in 2003 in response to decades of declining voter turnout, particularly among youth — have failed to combat the troubling trend seen in Canada and virtually every western democracy.

“I am not arguing that Elections Canada’s advertising drives turnout down,” Poilievre said in an email to Postmedia News on Wednesday. “Rather, it fails to drive turnout up, because it does not address the practical obstacles that prevent many from voting.”

But Poilievre’s equation doesn’t add up for experts who study the complex phenomenon of voter turnout.

Jon Pammett, political science professor at Carleton University, said Poilievre’s equation reflects a flawed understanding of cause and effect.

“There’s a name for this in statistics,” said Pammett. “All this is based on simply a correlation.”

True, voter turnout in Canada has failed to rebound significantly in the last 10 years; after declining precipitously in the 1990s – from 71% to 61%– it hit an all-time low of 58.8% in 2008 before climbing back up in 2011 to 61%.

But when it comes to the relationship between voter outreach and voter turnout, Pammett cautions that A plus B does not always equal C.

“You simply don’t know from simple observation of two things. It’s quite possible that the decline would have been even greater if the campaigns weren’t working.”

Pammett points out there have not been many Canadian experiments carried out to measure the impact of Elections Canada’s efforts to inspire youth to vote – everything from TV ads during some elections to school-based initiatives such as Student Vote, a mock election program. Evidence from south of the border, however, has shown non-partisan campaigns do make a difference in getting people to vote, particularly among the young.

Celebrity-laced TV ads from the youth-oriented campaign Rock The Vote made a measurable impact during the 2004 presidential election, said Columbia University political scientist Donald P. Green, who suggested Poilievre could use a “remedial course in statistics.”

“It’s one thing to say governments should have no business encouraging voter turnout … But to say that such efforts do not work is demonstrably false.”

While there is no magic bullet for the voter turnout problem, Green, co-author of the 2008 book Get Out The Vote, said hundreds of randomized studies in the United States have identified best practices used to engage voters.

Good old-fashioned door-knocking by party volunteers has the highest rate of return, he said, noting strong voter mobilization campaigns by both the Democrats and Republicans are credited with a more than five-point jump in voter turnout during the 2008 presidential election.

At first blush, the U.S. findings appear to support another of Poilievre’s assertions about the Fair Elections Act: that by limiting Elections Canada’s mandate to providing the bare bones basics of when, where and how to vote, “It will be left to aspiring candidates and parties to give people something for which to vote, and to reach out to citizens where they are.”

But strict campaign finance restrictions in Canada mean it is unlikely political parties in this country would be able to execute voter outreach campaigns on the scale seen in the United States, said Green, noting they typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, Elections Canada’s own data shows that youth – the drivers of downward voter trends – are likely to be on the losing end if it is forced to cancel programs promoting civic engagement.

The agency’s national youth survey found young people were more likely to vote when contacted by political parties, but only 40% said parties reached out to them, compared to 75% of Canadians over 65 who were courted by candidates or party volunteers.

Additionally, young people who take courses in government or democracy are 14% more likely to vote than those who do not, Elections Canada has found. Their parents were also more likely to vote.

Elections Canada spokeswoman Diane Benson said it is unclear whether the agency will still be able to offer school-based initiatives to promote voting, or partner with youth voter organizations such as Apathy Is Boring under the Fair Elections Act.

Asked if those programs would be affected, Poilievre’s spokeswoman Gabrielle Renaud-Mattey responded: “The job of an election agency is to inform citizens of the basics of voting: where, when and what ID to bring.”